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From food safety infosheets to food safety infographics: Can your pâté make you sick?

The concept behind food safety infosheets is to take recent foodborne illness media coverage, and relevant evidence, and provide it to food handlers in a nice package. At first, they were text heavy, boring and weren’t very good. After a couple of years of refinement food safety infosheets turned into tool resulting in measured changes in practices.

If you’re doing the same stuff for 10 years without changing, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.

That’s kind of where we’ve been at with food safety infosheets for the past year. After making a couple of hundred of them we decided the format was getting old and tired. Katrina Levine joined the crew and put some renewed enthusiasm into the storytelling devices – and also suggested that we start making infographics.

After looking at our own lack of skill and capabilities we sought an outside partnership with New Mexico State University Media Productions. They get us; and do fabulous work.

Here’s the first food safety infographic that tells the story of last week’s outbreak of Campylobacter linked to undercooked chicken livers.

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About Ben Chapman

Dr. Ben Chapman is a professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University. As a teenager, a Saturday afternoon viewing of the classic cable movie, Outbreak, sparked his interest in pathogens and public health. With the goal of less foodborne illness, his group designs, implements, and evaluates food safety strategies, messages, and media from farm-to-fork. Through reality-based research, Chapman investigates behaviors and creates interventions aimed at amateur and professional food handlers, managers, and organizational decision-makers; the gate keepers of safe food. Ben co-hosts a biweekly podcast called Food Safety Talk and tries to further engage folks online through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and, maybe not surprisingly, Pinterest. Follow on Twitter @benjaminchapman.